Banking Services: Accessibility

Richard Foord Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the accessibility of banking services.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for permitting me the opportunity to raise the issues and concerns about access to banking services across the country and in our communities. These are nationwide concerns, and the issue vexes many MPs and constituents—certainly in my constituency, where a large number of banks have closed in the last decade. Many people, particularly the digitally excluded and the most vulnerable, have been left in extremely difficult circumstances.

My relationship with banking is rather rudimentary, and I hope that those more engaged in debates on banking and financial services will tolerate my rudimentary dialogue on this issue; it is not one of my specialist subjects by any means, as I think will become apparent. Nevertheless, as a Member of Parliament, I have taken a very close interest in this issue, largely provoked by the closure in January this year of a bank in my constituency —in Penzance, west Cornwall. That has had a rather offensive impact on the town.

I am also concerned about the rather high-handed manner in which this closure was carried out, without any consultation—simply an announcement that was then followed through. I was shocked by the impact and many resulting factors of the closure, as well as the dismissive attitude of the bank when it came to that impact on some of the most vulnerable, disabled and digitally excluded people in the community. I have had a nine-year sabbatical from this place; when I was here previously, I did not face these issues as there were not any bank closures. There have been significant closures since. I was surprised at the dialogue and the attitude of the high-street bank—in this case, Lloyds.

I declare an interest in that I was a loyal Lloyds customer until last week; I had been for more than the last half century. I have been so dismayed by the attitude and approach of the bank to this closure that I have withdrawn all my custom and taken it elsewhere, and the bank knows it. The same applies to many in the Penzance area of my constituency.

When it announced the closure, the bank promised the local community a community banker who would come for one day every fortnight into a public building to offer an alternative service to help those people who needed face-to-face banking. I have had the following information from a constituent who attended one of those sessions very recently; they have only just been set up. The hub, held in St John’s Hall, a local authority building in Penzance, consisted of one community banker, with equipment in a very large room; no cash or notes were available, only advice. There were 28 people queueing to see the community banker, waiting in a very public place in an echoey room; there is no confidentiality there. The first two people waiting were in the meeting room for one hour—20 people stayed; eight left because they could not wait any longer.

This person’s wife arrived at 9 am and arrived back home just before 12 midday, having walked to and fro. It was a total shambles, which shows the disregard Lloyds has for people. The next time the community banker arrives, which is apparently now in three weeks’ time, the hub will be held upstairs, which is not good for older and disabled people. The nearby post office at St Clare could not dispense any cash during that time because the system was down, including the cashpoint outside the post office. Lloyds has recently stopped people from cashing cheques at post offices as well, so banking services that should be and have been provided to people have been withdrawn.

According to Fair4All Finance, more than 20 million people across the UK are in “financially vulnerable circumstances”. One in 10 people has no savings, and 21% have less than £1,000 in savings—nearly a third of our population are in extremely financially vulnerable situations: just one or two pay packets away from homelessness. Nearly 2 million people have used an unlicensed lender or loan shark in the last year, and 4.5 million people in financial vulnerability prefer face-to-face banking with a person. The issue has grown in urgency in many parts of the country. Access to in-person banking should be an essential public service. Closures affect people’s financial security, local economies, small business survival, digital inclusion, and the independence and dignity of older and disabled people.

The Minister will no doubt refer to the fact that banking hubs have replaced the banks, which have all been removed from towns, falling like a house of cards. However, having looked at the services available through hubs, I have to say that they are very limited in scope. I wonder about their sustainability in the longer run.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate, because so many people in my area of Devon, as well as his area of Cornwall, feel strongly about the issue. Not only are fewer services available when a bank closes its high street branch, but, if they are available a banking hub, they are available only one day per week rather than five. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is in the gift of the Government to reconsider the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, and to look again at the ease with which banks are closing their high street branches?

[Andrew George]

I strongly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. I will come to questions to the Minister in a moment; I believe that the Government need to look at the robustness and sustainability of those services. What has been put in the place of banks is rather flimsy in the longer term, and that represents a risk to the future of financial services, which are essential, particularly for the most vulnerable and digitally excluded in our society.

It is worth reflecting that Members of Parliament using digital technologies perhaps do not entirely comprehend how difficult that is for some people. I am not one of the most IT-savvy people on the planet by any means, so I sympathise with those people to a certain extent. Even when someone gets on top of the electronic capacity required to use electronic services, the services often still contain degrees of linguistic ambiguity that leave even the most intelligent and educated among us rather confused. Unless someone can speak to a human being, that ambiguity remains and the inaccessibility of those services continues as well. It is not just the electronics, but the fact that someone cannot ask anyone who has designed the system what on earth they mean by the options available.

I am surprised that the review of access to financial services has been reduced to an assessment of merely cash. That is what the regulations seem to say. My hon. and gallant Friend suggested that the Government need to look at this again, and I hope they will. The framework designed to protect communities from losing central banking services is far too narrowly focused. Current legislation and regulatory oversight look almost exclusively at access to cash, but needs to look at access to banking, banking advice, account advice and other services. Even Link’s formal assessments openly state that it does not consider access to more complex banking needs. It allows banks to close branches even when communities remain deeply dependent on face-to-face support, as we found in the case of Penzance, which I mentioned earlier.

I ask the Minister to extend the regulatory framework, including the 2023 Act, which my hon. and gallant Friend has referred to already, so that it protects access to banking and not just cash; so that it strengthens and widens the FCA’s role to ensure that local impact, equality analysis and access to banking services more widely are mandatory considerations before closures are permitted to go ahead; so that it requires realistic travel assessments for rural and island communities; so that it improves standards and the roll-out of service standards for banking hubs; and so that it considers proportionate service obligations on banks, not least because these banks are, after all, too big to fail. In 2008, Lloyds was bailed out to the tune of more than £20 billion of taxpayers’ money.

The bank says in its branding that it is “By Your Side”—but apparently only until it finds that to be unsuitable: an empty branding slogan, one is bound to observe. I hope the Minister looks at this issue. It is a matter not of consumer choice, but consumer displacement. Around 14% of adults in financially vulnerable communities in the UK—that is 2.8 million people—live in rural areas, and the rural nature and travel involved need to be considered, too.